I know the overall issue isn't indicative of individual families, but would that thereby make families with a large amount of children rare? Is it encouraged in any way, for families well off enough to make it happen, to have more children? I had originally planned to have my main character hail from a large family (with subsequent family issues later down the line when his parents divorced and custody of all children went to his mother- all of which are under 18, aside from the MC himself). -
Yes, families with large numbers of children are very, very rare. The largest I have ever met is three children. The largest I’ve ever seen or read in media set post-WWII is three children, and the most common reason a modern fictional family has more than two children seems to be so that one can be bumped off in a murder mystery as victims to be mourned. Two used to be the ideal but even that is seeing a decline.
If you want a large family, you might want to look at climbing one or even generations up and giving your character a background from a rural family. One or two generations above mine, born pre-WWII or during WWII, if the family is rural, you’d find families with five children plus, resulting in lots of cousins and extended family for us. :) My uncle is the eldest of twelve.
The reason why I emphasise rural is because on top of depopulation, the other reason why city families are small - two children being the ideal, three children MAX - is the issue of extreme population concentration in a few urban areas and thus population density.
Tokyo is incredibly population dense and its housing reflects that. A rural house often has space for a large family with many children. Old families, in particular, might have the space necessary, since they’ve had the years to develop their homes and likely have the property on which to do it. City families, however, are more likely to live in apartments that are just large enough to be comfortable and to fit their basic needs and no more. Corridors are JUST wide enough, ceilings are JUST high enough. Everything is about economy of space, how to make use of space as efficiently as possible because there is so little of it, which is why there’s such a market in Japan for compact-sized goods (with bonus points for easy storage features).
The less economically affluent you are, the less living space you have, and generally speaking, the less likely you are to have more than two children. There is no stigma towards it, as such, but you might be thought socially irresponsible (as parents) and, possibly, a neighbourhood inconvenience.
Inconvenience - meiwaku - is a key guiding principle in how to interact with your neighbours and navigate the Japanese social minefield. If you’re not sure what to do, or what is socially acceptable, think about how the action might inconvenience somebody. So many Japanese social niceties I can think of are based around meiwaku.
Having more than three (even two children) is definitely going to increase your chances of being labelled - at least in the city, if you live in a small, narrow apartment - a kinjo meiwaku lit. ‘A neighbourhood inconvenience’. It’s going to restrict your options of where you can move and you’d better keep your children on their best behaviour, or rope in your eldest as a substitute parental figure to the younger children - to prevent complaints your neighbours or landlord.
Having more children than you keep control over and provide the necessary housing for is a social inconvenience. This will lessen if you’re in the rural areas, where there is space and such a high proportion of elderly in comparison to the young that I’ve heard several saying that they genuinely miss seeing young children. Also, it helps if your family is embedded in the local area i.e. if you’re raising your kids where you were raised. People treat you less as a social inconvenience if you are the society and are part of the area fabric, if you will.
On top of that, Japan is heavily gendered in its domestic roles, with as of 2015 60% of working women leaving work to be professional homemakers after the birth of their first child. The husband or male partner then continues with the role of sole breadwinner and, in order to fulfil Japanese workplace obligations (which include late night evening socials, almost mandatory to attend, and overtime expected as a duty to your company, without which you likely won’t be noticed for a promotion - your absence from the overtime certainly will be noticed and your dedication to the company questioned) he will spend very little time on the care of his children. With most of the childcare focused on a single woman, more than two children becomes very difficult to manage, especially once they start getting involved with the pressures of the education system.
None of this is to say that people don’t want larger families. I’ve heard that the old proverb ‘ichi hime, ni tarou’ is often misinterpreted these days as ‘One girl, two boys’ as an ideal children count to aspire to if a woman has the time or, most crucially, space. Ichi hime, ni tarou’ is actually an ideal of child-bearing pattern meaning ‘a girl first, a son second’. The idea there is that the daughter will be able to help the mother rear the son, which adds to my point about the pressure on women as the homemakers. It’s an old ideal that hasn’t died yet.
If you want to make your family unconventional and a bunch of social misfits and outcasts, generally whispered about, considered suspect and unpopular in their neighbourhood, then giving an urban mother five children would certainly be a dramatic source of tears, stress, neighbourly gossip, social pressures and you could easily write a group of off-beat, likely embittered, children, just longing to get out of their cramped living space.
The other way you could have a large family would be half-siblings, from previous divorces or out of marriage. Maybe half-siblings bond over the pain their father caused their mothers. it depends on individual personalities, after all. :)
